Concept in Definition ABC

Now that there is so much talk about WhatsApp videoconferencing and competence that can mean to Skype, many of us forget about a system that has a lot of acceptance and popularity among owners of Apple devices,

Facetime, which is Apple's proprietary video conferencing platform for Mac computers and iPhone, iPad and iPod mobile devices, that is included in the operating system of computers (macOS), while for iOS it must be purchased at the price of 0.99 dollars / euros.

For iOS, the app was launched on the market in mid-2010, while at the operating system desktop arrived early the following year, 2011.

As a video codec, it uses H.264, while as an audio codec it opts for AAC.

In the case of the H.264 codec, this is freely accessible, but the AAC is not, although it is free for non-commercial use.

FaceTime can work with both Wi-Fi connections and 3G / 4G cellular connections,

Thanks to the quality and the high degree of compression provided by the codecs used, although in a beginning it only worked over Wi-Fi connections

In addition, the iPhone integrates with the calls the possibility of going from an ordinary telephone conversation to a FaceTime conversation with the press of a button on the screen. From the moment we make the change from one system to another, minutes of voice will stop being spent to start counting the megabytes of data.

Like all video conferencing services and systems, or those that offer the possibility of making video calls (Skype, Hangouts, WhatsApp), FaceTime is incompatible with the others.

Compared to other applications that do support multi-party video conferencing functionality, FaceTime only offers one-to-one video conferencing.

Being a app that does not have a dialer, that is, the keyboard number of the telephones in which the numbers that have not been added to the contact book are dialed,

It is only possible to call, via FaceTime videoconference, those people whose identifier in the system we already have previously entered in our contact book and, of course, these must have been registered in FaceTime previously. This registration process requires having an Apple ID.

The future of FaceTime looks good; Although it is not one of the most used videoconferencing applications due to its limitation platform wise (Apple systems only), but it has a legion of fans among those who use iPhone and Mac, and all the support for from Apple.

Photos: Fotolia - Konstantin Yuganov / The Last Word